Seduced by a vision of TS Eliot in The Waste Land

When Wilton’s Music Hall re-opened in 1997, after a long period of neglect, it was with Deborah Warner’s staging of TS Eliot’s modernist masterpiece, performed by Fiona Shaw.

Sadly, as that production returns to Wilton’s, this charming Victorian venue is still in need of major structural and cosmetic improvements.

The revival is a fundraiser, a 150th birthday present to the music hall from two of its most ardent champions.

It also represents an opportunity to revisit and re-evaluate Eliot’s difficult and often obscure vision of a wounded, fragmented world.

Shaw’s interpretation is bold, sharp and detailed, contemplative yet also feverishly dramatic, just occasionally tipping over into pealing hyperbole.

Eliot originally considered calling the poem "He Do the Police in Different Voices" — an allusion to Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend — and this version brings to life its opulent polyphony, which isn’t satisfactorily evoked in Eliot’s own rather dusty recording.

At the same time, the coherence of the poem is palpable. It’s a work with no fixed centre but here it appears to teem with internal connections.

While each of the five distinct sections resonates in its own way, the links between them are subtly pointed, and Jean Kalman’s lighting accentuates the poem’s shadows and moments of sudden dazzle.

This nuanced rendition of The Waste Land is a reminder — as if we needed it — of Shaw’s versatility as an actor, and especially of her capacity for a kind of comedy that mixes cleverness with warmth.